Daily Alert Archives

For Too Long, American Presidents Let Iran Believe It Could Act with Impunity

(The Dispatch) Lt.-Gen. (ret.) H.R. McMaster - In my first year at West Point, I was part of a cordon of cheering cadets who welcomed back to American soil 52 people who had been held hostage by the Iranian regime for 444 days. The hostage crisis was just the beginning of what would become a four-decades-long "twilight war" that the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged against the United States, Israel, and its Arab neighbors. The U.S. response, across seven different administrations, has suffered from a failure to consider adequately how historical memory, emotion, and ideology drive and constrain the theocratic dictatorship in Tehran. The exception has been President Donald Trump, who from 2017 to 2021 implemented a strategy of maximum pressure on Iran, and in January 2020 decided to kill the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, and his Iraqi militia puppet, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in Baghdad. Trump recognized that the Iranian regime cannot be conciliated and that efforts to de-escalate confrontations with Iran had allowed it to escalate on its own terms with impunity. On October 7, 2023, the Iranian-supported terrorist organization Hamas lit the "ring of fire" Tehran had built around Israel with heinous acts of mass murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping. Hizbullah entered the war against Israel the next day as Iran mobilized proxies in Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen. The Israeli and U.S. military operations directly against the Islamic Republic and its war-making apparatus reminded officials in Tehran that they cannot antagonize their adversaries in the region with impunity - and reminded officials in Washington that Iran's theocratic dictatorship cannot be conciliated. "De-escalation" was never a path to peace - it was an approach that perpetuated war on the Iranians' terms. The writer, a former U.S. national security adviser, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
2025-07-01 00:00:00
Full Article